Introduction : Describing and Explaining L2 Acquisition

    1.       What is ‘second language acquisition’?

L2 acquisition can be defined as the way in which people learn a language other than their mother tongue, inside or outside of a classroom, and ‘Second Language Acquisition’ (SLA) as the study of this.

    2.       What are the goals of SLA?

One of the goals of SLA is the description of L2 acquisition. Another is explanation; identifying the external and internal factors that account for why learners acquire an L2 in the way they do. One of the external factors is the social milieu in which learning takes place. Social conditions influence the opportunities that learner have to hear and speak the language and the attitudes that they develop towards it. Another external factor is the input that learners receive, that is, the samples of language to which a learner is exposed.

A final set of internal factors explain why learners vary in the rate they learn an L2 and how successful they ultimately are. The goals of SLA are to describe how L2 acquisition proceeds and to explain this process and why some learners seem to be better at it than others.

    3.       Two case studies

A case study is a detailed study of a learner’s acquisition of an L2. It is typically longitudinal, involving the collection of samples of the learner’s speech or writing over a period of time, sometimes years. The two case studies which we will now examine were both longitudinal. One is of an adult learner learning English in surroundings where it serves as means of daily communication and the other of two children learning English in a classroom.

a.       A case study of an adult learner

Wes was a thirty-three year-old artist, a native speaker of Japanese. He had had little formal instruction in English, having left school at fifteen. While he remained in Japan his contacts with native speakers were few and far between. It was only when he began to visit Hawaii, in connection with his work, that he had regular opportunities to use English. Wes, then, is an example of a ‘naturalistic’ learner- someone who learns the language at the same time as learning to communicate in it.

b.      A case study of two child learners

It was an investigation of two child learners in a classroom context. Both were almost complete beginners in English at the beginning of the study. This study would find out how the two learners acquired the ability to perform requests for services and goods over the period of the study. By the end of the study, therefore, the two learner’s ability to use requests had grown considerably.

What do these case study show us? First, they raise a number of important methodological issues relating to how L2 acquisitiom should be studied. Second, they raise issues relating to the description of learner language. Third, they point to some of the problems researchers experience in trying to explain L2 acquisition.

    4.       Methodological issues

One issue has to do with what it is that needs to be described. Another issue concerns what it means to say that a learner has ‘acquired’ a feature of the target language. A third problem in trying to measure whether ‘acquisition’ has taken place concerns learners’ overuse of linguistic forms.

    5.       Issues in the description of learner language

One finding is that learners make errors of different kinds. Another finding is that L2 learners acquire a large number of formulaic chunks, which they use to perform communicative functions that are important to them and which contribute to the fluency of their unplanned speech. One of the most interesting issues raised by these case studies is whether learners acquire the language systematically.

    6.       Issues in the explanation of L2 acquisition

One is that learners follow a particular developmental pattern because their mental faculties are structured in such a way that this is the way they have to learn. Other explanations emphasize the importance of external as opposed to internal factors.